Agostino

All opinions to be taken as gospel.

[Agostino @ChiefBamboozler]

@rickjeff78 Woodrow Wilson is still the worst but Trump is probably 2nd. Mainly because we haven’t seen the outcomes in hindsight. If he actually causes world war then he’ll be 1.

[The Hormuz Letter @HormuzLetter]

BREAKING: Iran's Foreign Ministry directly rejects Trump's new claim that "everyone in Iran has approved the deal," including the Supreme Leader, saying no one has accepted it, and "no agreement has been reached," per Fars.

Any agreement requires the US to "accept every demand" from Iran, including that it won't surrender enriched uranium or make nuclear concessions, that the Strait of Hormuz remains permanently under Iranian management, and the transfer of $24 billion in frozen funds. Iran adds "if it were to yield under pressure, it would have done so a year ago" rather than after sustained US bombing.

The spokesperson also denied Trump's claim that the Strait of Hormuz would reopen on a deal signing, saying it "remains closed" under Iranian authority and "safe passage is not possible."

[Agostino @ChiefBamboozler]

@OddStats Yes, they can.

[Agostino @ChiefBamboozler]

@calvinfroedge Im seeing a ton more frustration from normies calling BS. Feels like it’s time for the grand finale.

[Agostino @ChiefBamboozler]

@DonMiami3 There is literally no incentive for Iran to accept a deal when they can hurt the USA infinitely more by just waiting. Unless Trump totally folds and gives them everything. The gay ayatollah should demand Trump give him head while he’s at it.

[Agostino @ChiefBamboozler]

@DonMiami3 Imagine if the spaceX and peace deal signing are sell the news events because it means the manipulation is over.

[David Stockman @DA_Stockman]

The AI Bubble---Enron Redux or the Mother Of All Financial Circle Jerks.

by George Noble
The Noble Update
NVIDIA IS BUYING ITS OWN CHIPS AND CALLING IT REVENUE

And your retirement account is secretly holding the bag.

This scheme is literally straight out of the Enron playbook...

In January 2026, a special purpose vehicle called Valor Compute Infrastructure was created with one purpose:

Buy Nvidia's chips so Nvidia could book the sale as revenue.

Valor raised $5.4 billion and purchased over 100,000 of Nvidia's GB200 GPUs.

But $1.9 billion of that money came FROM Nvidia itself.

Nvidia invested $1.9 billion into the shell company, then sold that same shell company $5.4 billion worth of its own chips and booked every dollar as revenue.

It's the Girl Scout whose dad bought all the cookies and then she wins the sales contest because Dad was the customer. Except this Girl Scout is a trillion-dollar company and the cookie sale is $5.4 billion.

But it gets MUCH worse:

The remaining $3.5 billion in financing came from Apollo Global Management. Apollo structured the debt, packaged it into securities, and then sold those securities to Athene.

And guess who Athene is? Apollo's OWN insurance subsidiary. The one that sells fixed annuities to American retirees as safe, conservative retirement products.

Follow the chain:

Nvidia funds a shell company with $1.9 billion. The shell company buys $5.4 billion in Nvidia chips. Apollo finances the remaining $3.5 billion. Apollo sells the debt to its own insurance arm. That insurance arm packages it into annuity products and sells them to retirees who think they're buying something safe.

The retirees have no idea that their retirement savings are now backed by 100,000 computer chips sitting in some data center that will be worth pennies on the dollar in three years.

Now look at what's happening inside Athene:

$74.2 billion in US reserves but $217 billion in assets have been shifted to a Bermuda-based captive insurer, outside normal US regulatory oversight.

$103 billion of that portfolio (roughly 35%) is classified as Level 3 assets. That means there is no observable market price.

These assets are valued by internal models, not by actual markets.

And sitting on top of all those unpriced assets? 16.6x leverage.

If you're getting flashbacks to 2008, you should be.

Back then it was mortgages bundled into securities that nobody understood, sold to investors who had no idea what they were holding, rated as safe by agencies that never looked under the hood.

Today it's GPU-backed securities. Computer chips bundled into structured credit instruments, routed through an offshore insurance subsidiary, and sold to you as a retirement product.

The collateral is 100,000 GPUs leased to a single customer through an xAI subsidiary. If xAI stops making lease payments for any reason - financial distress, a pivot in strategy, anything - the entire structure unravels.

And Nvidia releases new architectures every year, so each generation delivers dramatically more compute per watt. A 5 year lease on technology that's obsolete in 2 years creates a mismatch that should terrify every annuity holder in America.

Every single step in this chain is technically legal. The SPV is legal, the lease is legal, Nvidia's equity stake is legal, the securitization is legal, and the Bermuda transfer is legal.

But legality and legitimacy are not the same thing.

I've seen every trick Wall Street has ever pulled in my 45 years of doing this.

And what I'm looking at right now is a pipeline that takes AI infrastructure risk, launders it through 8 layers of financial engineering, and deposits it in the retirement accounts of Americans who never agreed to fund Elon Musk's data centers.

In 2008 it was mortgage-backed securities.

In 2026 it's GPU-backed securities.

[Agostino @ChiefBamboozler]

@DonMiami3 Sounds smart, is dumb

[Agostino @ChiefBamboozler]

He will be deserving of a contract. A QO would be weird. If Lombard is the SS of the future then extension for Jazz makes the most sense because Volpe clearly is just buying time. QO for Grisham made perfect sense because he’s a good fit but they needed more time to see if Spencer Jones is going to be the CF.

[Agostino @ChiefBamboozler]

@jayson_casper For the children that might get blown up I’d say it’s pretty bearish.

[Agostino @ChiefBamboozler]

@DonMiami3 No, Anna, no!

[Agostino @ChiefBamboozler]

@DonnieCollinsTT There’s always someone who thinks they can fix it. Even Peraza had a resurgence. Grichuk played well after being cut. There’s always value.

[Agostino @ChiefBamboozler]

@rickjeff78 I am confused as to what the peace hope has to do with any of the failing underlying fundamentals. The war makes everything worse but it was looking bad before.

[Agostino @ChiefBamboozler]

@BrendanKutyNJ Judge bought Volpe’s suit too

[Agostino @ChiefBamboozler]

@rickjeff78 Feels like this has been obvious for weeks already but maybe most people are a lot more retarded than I even thought.

[Agostino @ChiefBamboozler]

@jeffreytucker Uhh yeah. Plus whatever vestiges of privacy we had will be completely destroyed.

[Whale Insider @WhaleInsider]

JUST IN: 🇺🇸🇮🇷 President Trump has declared an Iran deal 'imminent' 37 times, yet no agreement has been reached - CNN.

[Agostino @ChiefBamboozler]

@RyanGarciaESM Feel like that’s why they traded for him. His power had nothing to do with Coors field. Why he can’t raise the average is a mystery unto itself.

[Agostino @ChiefBamboozler]

@marklevinshow Accurate statements don’t get community notes.